November 20, 2012
Oedipus, murderer of his father, husband of his mother, Oedipus the solver of the Sphinx riddle! What does this trinity of fateful deeds tell us? There is an ancient popular belief, particularly in Persia, that a wise magician can only be born out of incest; the riddle-solving Oedipus who woos his mother immediately leads us to interpret this as meaning that some enormous offense against nature (such as incest in this case) must first have occurred to supply the cause whenever prophetic and magical energies break the spell of present and future, the rigid law of individuation, and indeed the actual magic of nature. How else could nature be forced to reveal its secrets, other than by victorious resistance to her, i.e. by some unnatural event? I see this insight stamped out in that dreadful trinity of Oedipus’s fate: the same man who solves the riddle of nature—of that ambiguous sphinx—must also destroy the most sacred natural laws when he murders his father and marries his mother.
Nietzsche - The Birth of Tragedy
Posted by amin at November 20, 2012 10:44 AM